20th December 2005, 06:27 PM
Quote:quote:Surely it is not legal to demand IIP as a pre-qualification?
What a bizarre situation it would be if that is possible, yet membership, corporate or individual, of a professional institution is not a legitimate pre-qualification.
I am reminded of the old b-it about Quality Assurance. What a farcical paper chase that was.
Not only is IIP a legitimate criteria for pre-qualification, but it is one often used. However, you are wrong to think that professional memberships are not legitimate criteria - they are also often used, as is RAO status sometimes. Quite a few of the tenders we submit (and some of the ones we invite) require appropriate individual IFA memberships and/or RAO status. QA is the most common criteria of all. I also used to think that QA was a waste of time, but as I come across old jobs being revived after gaps of several years I thank god for QA where it has been applied and weep tears of blood where it hasn't.
There may be some confusion about what 'pre-qualification' means here. We are talking about very large multi-disciplinary projects (often with fees in the millions), for very large clients, where simply preparing and submitting a tender may cost ?50-100K and the client may spend months doing the tender assessment. To avoid wasting their time, the clients use a pre-qualification process whereby only firms that can meet certain criteria (mainly technical ability, track record and availability of resources) are even allowed to submit a tender. So, perhaps 10-50 firms might be invited to pre-qualify, and only the top 4-6 might be selected to go on the tender list.
To save time on checking some aspects of the aspirant pre-qualifying firm, the client company can accept 3rd-party certifications such as IIP, QA and RAO as demonstrating competence in certain areas.
I know from experience that none of these certifications are rubber-stamps; they are hard to get, and easy to lose on an audit. You do pay for them, but the subscription cost pales into insignificance by comparison with the staff time and effort involved in qualifying for them. Of the three, RAO is easier than IIP or QA.
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